Acil Tabbara is a senior media professional with over 30 years of experience with Agence France Presse, a leading international news organization. She is Lebanon and Syria bureau chief, after having been Gulf regional bureau chief and head of the Arabic newsdesk. She covered the events that shaped the Middle East and North Africa region from the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the invasion of Iraq and the Arab regimes’ change of 2011. She has also reported for Radio France Internationale and was cohead of local news at L’Orient-Le Jour newspaper in Beirut. A dual Lebanese and French citizen, she was born in Beirut and started her journalism career in 1986 as a reporter in Lebanon. She then worked in Cairo, Damascus, Dubai and Nicosia before going to Paris as an editor on AFP’s international desk. In June 2019, she was the laureate of the Women in News Editorial Leadership Award for the MENA region.
